About Daniel Blignaut

An architect-turned-artist, Daniel Blignaut has been, in his words, “unabashedly” pursuing beauty for 30 years, in paintings filled with lively, rhythmic combinations of colors, patterns, and textures. Interested in the expressive and symbolic resonances of color, and influenced by naïve art and children’s drawings, he describes the contrast between art-making and architecture as one of freedom versus stricture: “As an architect, I had to work with very strict drafting guidelines...As an artist, I am more interested in the accidental line, and in rich, complex surfaces, so I have always worked with ‘found’ and ‘discovered’ elements.” Among the found elements with which he works are his own children’s drawings, which informed his early paintings. Trees, flattened, multicolored, and wildly patterned, recur throughout his compositions; for Blignaut, they are metaphors for human beings and the cycle of life.

South African , b. 1957, South Africa, based in Safety Harbor, Florida